Somersault Magazine Vol. 1/Issue 1

“But they’ve fixed it up and it’s fine now. We should go!”

It’s late, and Ahmad has to be up early the next morning. He has to drive south for a funeral. The plan is put off for another night.

Here is a place subject to inconstancy. So many things are fickle -- the weather, the tide, the economy so tumultuous that the currency must be pegged at fifteenhundred lira to the dollar, the peace interrupted by paroxysms of violence every other summer. No one flinches when the lights go off, as they do once or twice each summer day. They know the power will return, something they take on faith. They believe -- they must believe -- that things that are gone will, in time, return.

The new apartment blocks, built since the end of the war, cluster along the shore. From the balconies, wealthy businessmen peer over their newspapers to watch the students walking along Bliss Street, the fishermen and their sons clustering on the stony shore to cast for small mackerel and sole, the girls in bikinis sunning like mermaids or sirens under the awnings of the university’s private beach. Fifteen stories below the penthouse windows, soldiers carrying M-4 and AK-47 rifles stand at the gates, and in the evening, the wealthy draw down the metal shutters over their windows.

The shutters are precautions, vestiges of a war that, perhaps, is not finished.

There was a formal end, the signing of a power sharing agreement at Ta’if, but this was followed by another two years of violence, punctuated by the bomb that leveled the oldest building on the American University campus. After the bomb in 1991, there were fifteen years spent with the hand of Syria on the shoulder of the government; Lebanon was afforded being a single state again, but not a sovereign one. This only ended with the assassination of the Lebanese president, with the suspected collusion of Damascus. He is remembered as a martyr to the cause of Lebanese independence, his name memorialized throughout Beirut -- Rafic Hariri International Airport, Rafic Hariri Mosque, Rafic Hariri School of Nursing, the main thoroughfare of the city renamed Rafic Hariri Boulevard. Still, there persists the feeling, the foreboding dread that the armistice will not hold forever. In the evening, the metal shutters are still closed for the night.

“We hear so much about these ‘national interests’ that the United States is so eager to pursue, but no one can ever tell me what these interests are.” Omar is finishing his third cigarette since sitting down at the table. He smoked two more on the fifteen-minute drive to the bar. The waitress has already brought him a fresh ashtray.

“Can you tell me just what these ‘national interests’ are?”

He smudges out the cigarette, leaving the butt leaning against the rim of the ashtray.

23 ♦ Somersault